Obama’s New Afghanistan Troop Plan Raises Budget Questions Amid OCO Fight

...But Kate Blakeley, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that the current OCO budget has enough built-in "slack" to accommodate Obama's new troop policy. "The additional marginal costs of about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan would be quite small compared to the $41.7 billion requested for Operation Freedom's Sentinel in Afghanistan in FY-17," she said. "The FY-17 OCO budget request already is largely a continuation of FY-16 OCO funding levels for Afghanistan."..